I received my Ph.D. in Risk and Insurance at the Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin–Madison (committee: Professors Ty Leverty (chair), J. Michael Collins, Anita Mukherjee, Joan Schmit, Justin Sydnor). My research interests are in public economics and household finance, focusing on insurance regulation and personal finance decision making.

Publications

Improving financial and health literacy is an important step in reducing economic vulnerability in older age, yet the means by which individuals accumulate these types of human capital remains an open question. This paper evaluates the impact of online search activities on the levels of financial and health literacy. We find that using the internet for such information increases literacy significantly: doing so frequently (versus not at all) increases financial literacy by 16 percent and health literacy by 12 percent. Our results are robust to alternative measures of financial literacy. They are also robust to an instrumental variable approach using other web skills such as email use to proxy for how individuals use the internet.

Presented at: JCA/FLEC Research Symposium (2019, scheduled).

Working Papers

Regulation of contracts plays an important role in U.S. financial markets. In this paper, I estimate the costs of complying with contract regulation by exploiting the rich cross-sectional and time-series variation in regulation in the U.S. property-liability (P/L) insurance industry. The costs of complying with stringent contract regulation are significant, approximately 3.1 percent of the general expenses for the average insurer by line of business and year, or $1.8 BN for the industry per year. The compliance costs are higher in personal lines of insurance. The burden of these costs falls unevenly on insurers, with the regulatory effects isolated to the firms writing less than $5 MN in premiums in a line of business per year.

Medicaid provides a critical source of insurance against the rising costs of long-term care, and individuals may strategically offload assets (typically to children) to meet the means-tested eligibility requirement. Yet, evidence on such behaviors is limited. In this paper, we quantify the extent of strategic transfers using variation in the penalty for improper transfers induced by the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. We estimate difference-in-differences models based on the hypothesis that only individuals with high levels of self-reported nursing home risk (high risk) will alter transfers because of the Act. We find that over a two-year horizon, high risk individuals reduced transfers to children on the extensive margin by 10 percent and that the average total amount of transfers decreased by $1,700. We do not find any evidence that people adjusted real estate holdings in response to the DRA. We also conduct a triple-differences analysis to examine various forms of heterogeneity. We find that the reduction in transfers comes from high risk individuals who are less financially literate, suggesting that more financially sophisticated households either have other mechanisms to shield assets or are not sensitive to Medicaid eligibility.

We estimate the impact of technology adoption on the costs of complying with product regulation in the U.S. property-liability (P/L) insurance market by exploiting quasi-experimental variation in when states adopt the technology.